scarab92

10 ms·

91.
by scarab92 2y ago
More likely, overpriced institutions like Harvard will cease to be competitive for grants, and those which offer better value for money will be better placed to submit competitive grant proposals.
92.
by scarab92 2y ago
The clickbait article title is completely unsupported by the actual content of the article. The NIH isn't being slashed and burned. It's simply redirecting more of it's funding to actual grant recipients, to do actual researc
93.
by scarab92 2y ago
Marc is extremely intelligent, and he is an idealist. Idealists can run into implementation difficulties, but having listened to his interview, I don't recall anything that would be impossible to implement given the current make up of
94.
by scarab92 2y ago
Are you assuming that the current makeup of the civil service is ideologically diverse? It isn't. There were no conservatives at 18F.
95.
by scarab92 2y ago
It goes both ways. Innocent people can be genuine victims of lawfare, just as easily as guilty people can claim to be victims of lawfare. The previous administration is widely regarded to have engaged in lawfare, so I would prefer to assume
96.
by scarab92 2y ago
Maybe there are valid reasons to go after Musk, but the propensity of the previous administration towards lawfare clouds all of these investigations. There are no real checks and balances when it comes to launching investigations into your
97.
by scarab92 2y ago
> there seems to be this implicit assumption that people working in the bureaucracy are the ones making the rules Most regulations come about due to agency rulemaking under vague or broad statutes, so this implicit assumption is likely g
98.
by scarab92 2y ago
We use managed services, but only those that are managed versions of pre-existing software. For example, we'll used Managed Postgres, but not Azure or AWS's home grown databases. Makes migrating much easier.
99.
by scarab92 2y ago
Azure's anti competitive conduct is also the reason that AWS stopped lowering prices. Before 2014 or so, AWS would periodically reduce prices on major services passing on falling technology costs. Azure didn't like that, so they a
100.
by scarab92 2y ago
Why should rural areas be subsidised? No one is making you chose to live there, plus you get cost of living savings from being there rather than in expensive urban real estate. Also, Starlink isn’t all that much more expensive than fibre.
101.
by scarab92 2y ago
It does deserve scrutiny, but historically speaking swapping from legacy vendors to SpaceX or Starlink tends to result in cost savings for taxpayers. I would bet that is also the case in this instance, and the media’s outage needs to be te
102.
by scarab92 2y ago
I flagged because I can’t stand this overly moralising cancel culture attitude. This exact tech is already commonplace in industry, but no one is trying to find an industry wide solution, just taking cheap pot shots that the nth startup doi
103.
by scarab92 2y ago
LLMs killed this grift. They showed how easy it is to churn out consultant-level reports. The bar will be raised for consultants now, and only those who can actually bring unique contextually relevant and sound insights will survive. Such c
104.
by scarab92 2y ago
The media A/B tests headlines to see what generates the most clicks. The journalists then learn what their audience responds to and creates narratives around that. The result is the reality and the narrative often differ dramatically.
105.
by scarab92 2y ago
Because amortised capital cost > operational (power) cost It's cheaper to build a 1 GW baseload power plant to sit beside your existing GPUs, than to buy another 1 GW of GPUs to place on the other side of the planet. Also, latency.
106.
by scarab92 2y ago
> When that is the potential risk It's not a realistic risk. Chernobyl was absolute worse case. A massive reactor, with no containment structure (it was essentially in a shed), with a flammable solid state moderator, and no passive
107.
by scarab92 2y ago
Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds. For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas,
108.
by scarab92 2y ago
It's overall beneficial for society to switch to nuclear. The problem you posed is just a market structure implementation detail. Government could operate the plants, or they could offer insurance to private sector operators.
109.
by scarab92 2y ago
We should be building far more nuclear. We wildly overengineered on safety regulations making them far more costly and risky to build than they actually need to be. Even our older Gen II nuclear reactors from the 1990's are orders of m
110.
by scarab92 2y ago
It’s also a remote role. There aren’t many of those available anymore given how much it was abused.
111.
by scarab92 2y ago
Government doesn’t really have “its wealth”. By taking trillions away from the private sector (in taxes, inflation), it costs the economy tens of millions of jobs. It then spends that to create new jobs. Some of that spending has a positive
112.
by scarab92 2y ago
Government spending doesn’t necessarily create jobs, since the money it spends is taken from other people (as either taxes or inflation). It merely redistributes jobs.
113.
by scarab92 2y ago
Yes, they are VPSs But the more important point was that they started branding themselves as a cloud vendor 4 years ago, and investing in new offerings around that pitch, but it’s taking them far too long to release basic parts of the offer
114.
by scarab92 2y ago
Maybe in future, but for now these companies are not liked in MAGA-land, and simply attending the inauguration of a president hasn’t really changed anything.
115.
by scarab92 2y ago
I mean since they started marketing themselves as a cloud vendor and selling cloud instances, instead of just a dedicated server vendor.
116.
by scarab92 2y ago
They also move too slowly, so they fall further and further behind each year. For example, Hetzner has great potential, but they’re only just now releasing object storage after 4 years in the cloud space, and they don’t even have managed d
117.
by scarab92 2y ago
Except, MAGA hate all those companies. They view them as non-ideologically diverse breeding grounds for progressives.
118.
by scarab92 2y ago
Cs-137 half life seems to only be 30 years. I assume the best solution then is just to keep an exclusion zone, and shrink it over the decades as the Cs decays? Why did they expose so many humans (liquidators) to radiation trying to clean th
119.
by scarab92 2y ago
1. Smart people lie plenty. 2. Musk rarely lies, he's honest to a fault.
120.
by scarab92 2y ago
Depends on whether you agree with the Unitary Executive Theory. If you do, these employees do not report to congress, but instead to the White House. In which case, Musk is acting within the powers given to him by the citizens of the United

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